Well, except we usually have more people and drugs at our parties. And it lasts longer than 60 minutes. The dialogue usually consists of the following:
Wanna fuck? Ya got a cigarette can I get some pot/pills/blow off ya? Has anyone seen my underwear? Never mind, I don't need it anyways.
Hmmmm.. If we had cameras running, I wonder how many tapes we could fill.. I guess we could get in a little trouble for the drugs, eh? Maybe we should just start doing live shows..:) Oh, to be in Amsterdam..
Any woman that can use Unix has a spot in my heart.:) Funny, I always end up dating women who look at a computer and ask "Do you have AOL? I want to chat."
{sigh}
I want to date one that will sit down, write an AOL chat bot in 1/2 hour, and then we can giggle at people's reactions together.:) Well, til we get bored (about 20 seconds), and go out for drinks for the night.:)
Are you in a classified department at the gov't? They only release bits of the information on the actual specs, and even those are vauge.. We know it's black. We know it's max speed is in excess of Mach 4, and it has a service ceiling of LEO. Search the net a bit, or find a good book on the subject.
As for the term LEO (Low Earth Orbit), a quick search on google found NASA's defination as:
http://lsda.jsc.nasa.gov/kids/L&W/glossary.htm --- Low Earth Orbit (LEO) LEO is the term used to describe the space between 160 nautical miles to up to 300 nautical miles attitude. Which is the range of Space Shuttle missions. ---
The highest number on an official site I've seen for the SR-71 said 50 miles, so the other references of it flying there fall outside of NASA's spec for LEO.
Orbit is definately where you're flying, not that you're actually maintaining it.. Mir was in orbit til it hit the Pacific. It was in anything but a circle.
And don't forget about geosynchronous satellites.. 0 ground speed. If it wasn't, you'd have one hell of a time readjusting your DSS dish constantly. They have no speed to 'em, they just hang on a logical string (gravity).
This page cites the SR-71 to do at least:
http://www.dfrc.nasa.gov/gallery/photo/SR-71/HTM L/ EC95-42883-4.html --- Developed for the USAF as reconnaissance aircraft more than 30 years ago, SR-71s are still the world's fastest and highest-flying production aircraft. The aircraft can fly at speeds of more than 2,200 miles per hour (Mach 3+ or more than three times the speed of sound) and at altitudes of over 85,000 feet. ---
16 miles, or Mach 3.14 (at sea level).. But since it's still classified, they're just giving minimum's..
Kind of like saying my car can do 65mph, even though I know I've driven it over 160mph. General Motors can't advertise that the TransAm WS/6 or Camaro SS can do in excess of 160mph, so they just say "Fast".:)
BTW, a standard late model TransAm can exceed 150, without trying hard, you just need lots of road to do it in.. At 2.5 miles per minute, a couple seconds covers lots of ground. A WS/6 gets there even faster. Trust me.:)
Share what you know.. The more people that share their experiences, the more people we can save from making the same mistake we did (dealing with Wells Fargo Bank)
Already did it.. The first time, I accepted banks can have errors.. The second time, I took it personally..
I wasn't very far from the choices of lawsuit or showing up with gun in hand.. I'm all about using force to get my way. If I have to set a gun on someone's desk to get what's mine, it may be done.:)
I'd really like to know which morons we're dealing with, that we shouldn't be..
What if it wasn't Amazon, and turned out to be a regional grocery store that records all card numbers? Lots of people use debit/credit cards for groceries. Maybe "Von's" in California.. or Albertons (national)? Or Publix or Winn Dixie(South East). I'd bet a grocery store has weaker security than a web company.
Wells Fargo Bank cancelled my debit/Visa card with no notice.. Why? Because I purchased groceries in Los Angeles, and then there was a $300 purchase in the mid west for a plane ticket a few hours later.
Unfortunately, the $300 ticket was to get my 13 year old step-daughter on a plane to see her dad. We didn't know til we got to the airport and Delta told us my card was stolen..
I pulled out my card, and my ID, and showed it to them.. Didn't matter.. I called the bank. They had no record of who did it, only that it was reported as stolen.
Took me 8 hours on the phones with the bank, airline, and every vendor I had bought from in the surrounding days to find out what happened.
When the airline called to verify the card, the bank took the fact that I was buying a ticket for her to be fraud, and cancelled my card immediately.
I went to the bank to get it fixed. They said they tried to contact me. They had my correct number on file (my cell), but said it was disconnected. I had them call my cell from their desk. Amazingly enough, it rang, and I answered.
I've had banks call me before to verify transactions. I have no problem with that. But, lying about it pisses me off.
I wonder how badly they'd handle me on a road trip. I drive from Florida to California and back on a semi-regular basis.. It takes me three days, with very little sleep. That would probably get the card cancelled too.. I'd hate to be stuck in Kent Texas with no gas and a cancelled credit card, because they thought I had traveled too far.
I had a whole stack of returned items, and a whole lot of merchants to apologize to for the bank's error. I never received an apology from the bank.
A month later (a week before xmas), they accidently closed my bank account. I didn't find out til the ATM took my new card.. Their system said there was fraudulent activity. Another bank error. They put all my funds on hold til Jan 6. Good thing I have friends who would loan me money over Christmas. It really sucks to ask your friends to buy everything.. But, they all got paid back after I got my money back.
Every bill check I had sent out previous got bounced. Wells Fargo *ALSO* charged me $25 per check for NSF, even though the funds were in the account, but they erroniously put on fraud hold by them.
You wouldn't believe how pissed I was when I got to the bank. I was polite at first.. They continued to tell me how they were keeping my money.. So, I got louder.. They threatened to call the cops. I told them to. I *WANTED* a cop to hear them saying that they made a mistake and took my money, and wouldn't give it to me.
The bank security were the only nice people working there. One of the guards told me how they screwed him over too, so he was completely sympathetic. He was just standing around to make sure I didn't get physically violent. No problem there, I don't get physically violent, he doesn't have to do anything but stand there.:)
Warning! Never Use Wells Fargo Bank!
I finally got the second set of NSF fees dropped after a few hours of screaming.. Hopefully the customers who overheard the incident had second thoughts of keeping their account at Wells Fargo.
[Rant Mode Off]
I'm now using a nice small bank, that doesn't have the same problems. I told them all about it when I opened my new account. They had heard similiar stories before about them. I'm on a first name basis with the new bank, and they love me.
It's a thought I can entertain.. I know perfectly well I'll never get on some big gov't built anything craft, if it does exist in my lifetime..
If I have the rough equivalant of a sailboat in the middle of an ocean, it's more than we have now.. Look at what we've been doing..
Put what we're doing now in relationship to human travel on the planet.. The satellites we're sending out to other planets are like single recon/scouts.. The shuttle is like a pack mule with a limp.. We're in serious need of a sail boat, or something that'll get us more than a few feet outside of what we know..
But ya, I love your links.. Were they all Adams quotes? (It's late, and I'm a bit tired)
A little improbability drive would be nice.:) As long as we can calculate the probability (or improbability), anything is possible..:)
Well, "moons" was thrown in there, as a planet and any bodies that may be around it.. If there are or aren't is pretty much academic right now.. If there's something the size of a Volkswagon, or something the size of our moon that we haven't spotted doesn't really matter til something flies by.. The mass of Venus would be the important part..
Since I can't imagine the mass of such a ship to be all that much (relatively), a nice solid chunk of rock 10 miles across would be at least something to work with.:)
If the world works well, and things fall together where I can someday make such a ship (remote control or otherwise), I'll be sure to let/. know how it handles around moderate sized space objects.:) Until then, I'll stick by the statement that we don't know what's out there (yet).
If you're such an expert on our solar system, you'd be fully aware that the count of moons or even the number of planets in our solar system, changes on a regular basis..
Hell, we aren't even sure how many moons the Earth has.. Is it 2? Is it 3? Ok, #2 that they found recently was quickly dismissed as space junk, but #3 is expected to be in orbit in 100 years or so, and stay around for quite a while.. I believe Slashdot carried the story..
I don't expect any celestial facts to be solidified until we've actually visited those places..
Even in the last year or two, the opinions of the composition of the surface of Mars has been at least three things.
1) It's all rock.
2) Large bodies of frozen water are covered by a thin layer of dirt
3) The ice caps are covered with a thick layer of solid nitrogen, and almost no water/ice.
And we have a bit of equipment on and around Mars.. I don't believe any space agency has the same kind of equipment around Venus..
Unless of course, you just fell off a Vogon ship, and have some important news to share with us. Just don't read me any poetry.
Of course, once you put the sail down, you don't dramatically loose speed. There is a slight lack of resistance in space.. Well, other than gravity, solar winds, free hydrogen, and other space clutter.. But gravity would probably be your best friend.. Or navigational engines.. It should be pretty easy to stop something pretty light. It'll take a lot less force than say making 200 tons fly off the surface of the earth.:)
I'm guessing that he's eluding to the Nazi's work in better aeronautical work. They were leaders in rocket and jet powered aircraft.. Well, til they lost..:)
War is a great innovator. Jet aircraft were developed for military applications, and it trickled down to us civilians..
Of course, it takes a long time for us to get stuff. Look at the SR-71 Blackbird.. Flies in excess of Mach 4, and achieves a low earth orbit. No civilian versions of that yet though..
Boeing has a nice civilian airline version of it, that was posted on here a few months ago.. Only 40+ years after the SR-71 was designed.
Imagine if the gov't didn't try to keep everything secret. We'd be able to fly in low earth orbit, and do a full orbit of the planet in less than 2 hours.. They would have been flying a better shuttle, that didn't have a long running known design defect.. Ya.. I remember in the 80's, they were talking about the shuttle loosing heat tiles then.. You'd think they'd be using a better method by now...
Unless, of course, the theory of the left landing gear deploying early is true.. Or was it the landing gear door falling off..
It's the same force that keeps the moon in orbit without falling down on us..
Centrifugal force pulls the moon away from us.
Gravity (both from the Earth and Moon) pull them towards each other.
Kind of like if you swing a weight on a string. But gravity is the string. That's why the moon can be not in a geosynchronous orbit. It's string moves.:)
With a heavy weight (platform) on the end of their carbon nanotube string, far enough away from the Earth, the platform should be pulling on the string, so the fact that you're pulling a bit on the string back down isn't much.. You'd be as significant as an ant on top of a mountain.:)
That'll be an interesting place to visit..
I wonder how long after the build it, that someone will build a solar sail craft.. It's not a hard concept.. Make "sails" big enough to create a small force from the solar winds. Then it would be a simple matter of riding the winds and gravational forces of the bodies encountered. Mars may be a lot closer than we thought.. You could fly the solar system with almost no fuel.:)
I volunteer to take a fast run to Pluto. The course should be pretty easy. It'll just take a little math to figure out..
Leave the platform, "falling" towards the moon. Pass the moon, and change your vector towards the sun (ok, a little fuel). Now "fall" towards the sun.. It's a good sized object, it should have a little pull. (hehe).
Use Venus and it's moons your next turning point. Sails out, then pick and choose your planets to use to manuver..
With a bit of good navigation other solar systems aren't quite as unreachable as they are now..
Good.. I was thinking we're idiots too.. Either that, or I need to start routing all my traffic down the most conjested pipes to watch it go faster.:)
I've worked with our provider a bit with routing. We have mirrored servers in colo's around the country. If one city is conjested, we move traffic *AWAY* from the conjestion. Usually our traffic makes a difference for everyone else. I can have 500Mb/s added or removed from any given city within an hour, without flinching. Of course, before I do something like that, I put in a call first.. "Hey, can this city take 500Mb/s right now?"
We wrote a program to take traceroutes from all the cities to various points, and plot them all onto a big network map, with ping times and the like.. We know which cities, peerings, or lines have problems at a glance..
http://www.voyeurweb.com/network.12.23.2002-11h.pn g Warning: This picture is *BIG*. It's of our networks in Los Angeles, New York, Tampa, between each other, and to all of the root nameservers.. It makes a rather extensive map that is 11580x2669. It won't fit on your screen. Save it, and take it into your favorite image editing software to view it..
This map is a little old (Dec 23, 2002 at 11am), but it gives a good impression of what the networks immediately around our servers looked like, and how they interact with each other.. Shitty networks stand out in red.. I definately wouldn't want to MORE of my traffic that way. Sometimes we don't have a choice. If your ISP uses a shitty provider, we have to send it that way..
Ok, this has to be the most convoluted article I've ever read.. They're effectively saying, don't use the best route, pick another, because your extra traffic may break the best route.
We diagramed a sample network here in the office, to try and explain what we just read to ourselves.. We picked 5 cities (New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas, and Miami), and drew direct routes between Miami, LA, and NY to each other. Chicago gets routes to NY and LA. Dallas gets routes to everything but Chicago.
We then contemplated what a packet from LA to NY would be looking at.
On our mythical network, we have the following ping times.
LA -> NY 20ms LA -> Chicago -> NY 25ms LA -> Dallas -> NY 40ms LA -> Miami -> NY 60ms
So, we shoudn't be selfish, and take the LA->NY route? We should direct our traffic LA->Dallas->NY ? If this route is already slow or conjested, what good does that do? Now instead of using a perfectly good route, we're killing a conjected one.
If LA->NY is the best/fastest at the time, use it. If/when that becomes more conjested, it will no longer be the best choice, and the new best choice will be chosen..
Not everyone is going to be using YOUR best choice all the time.. Very doubtful that Miami will be routing to LA to go to NY. If they do, it's because Miami->LA is already overloaded. But as it usually works, For Miami->NY, there is already a second best choice (Miami->Dallas->NY).
No matter how we look at it, this doesn't make any sense.. Here's a sample of the lines for our example.
So, we'll leave the LA->NY route empty, and keep dumping our load onto the lesser routes?
I do like the idea though, to keep the best choice (LA->NY) open for myself.. Everyone else chooses the second best route.. Go ahead and flood those OC48's, I'll use the OC192 that no one else uses..:)
I guess we all have to define dates our own way.. Mine would be:
Flowers at the beginning.
Dinner & drinks
Entertainment (club, movie)
Foreplay
Sex
A pathetic date wouldn't make it past 1.. I show up with flowers, she shows up looking like a heroin junkie just coming down, that's the end of it..
An annoying date doesn't get past 2.. It's amazing how useful those "Call me at 10pm" calls are.. Always give yourself an out.. Unless you're just hard up for the sex, but even then, if you're that hard up, you aren't getting that far.
If we get to 3, you almost have it made.. Don't hit on her friends at the club, or steal all the candy at the movie..
If you get to 4, you're just proving to her that you're worth taking to 5..
If you get past 5, and she makes you breakfast in the morning, you've found the perfect woman.:)
Lots is always a relative term.. 10,000 people complaining to Microsoft about something seems like a lot.. But put it in perspective. There are millions of copies of their software out there.
To someone like me, if I had 10,000 customers upset with me, I'd have a serious problem (Personally, I don't have 10,000 customers), but to Microsoft, 10,000 customers completely upset with them that switch to Linux or Apple is insignificant.
But, they do want to squeeze you for every penny. That's why they keep getting more complicatd with their registration procedures.. If I remember correctly, the only qualification for installing Windows 3.1 was that you had the disks in hand. There was no registration code. They still made a fortune on it. People were sharing that all over the place.. I can't tell you how many "OEM" MSDOS and Win31 installations I saw, where the owner never had a book or disk from Microsoft..
I personally knew a place that did "OEM" Win95 and Win98 installations. They bought a case of pirated CD's.. Then they'd do the installations and never give the customers the disk or book. The box of pirated CD's was just for the 1 in 50 who complained because they didn't have a CD..
Microsoft looses a lot of money that way, but they make a whole lot too.. But why be a multi-billion dollar corporation, when you can be a multi-trillion dollar corporation..
Just imagine if they spent that money on making the product better, or giving it away to the community for further development. I'm sure something like the Apache Group would love $100 million to further their Win32 development..:)
Well, for the drug thing, there are lots of things that are legal and bad for you.. I was on some prescription pain killers for a while.. Highly addictive (but I wasn't), but they left me pretty much stoned for part of the day.. Usually from 6pm til 3am.. I've known people that are seriously addicted to them.. It's not too hard to find references to people who have died from them (Start with some famous references like Elvis and Marlyn Monroe).
No one has died from pot. Any condition that is claimed of it can be assigned to a whole variety of legal drugs (alcohol included).
The order was just an example. I get questioned about my credit cards every time I buy or apply for something.. I have three cards through a well known bank. There's a record of a fourth that was charged off but paid, and marked as "lost/stolen/or cancelled". I don't care to explain that to everyone that looks at my credit history, but every time I buy a car, it gets explained.
Time Warner Communication is also a clusterfuck. I was an existing customer with the m in Florida. There were two records on my credit history for them. $197 past due from like 1999, and an existing (and active) accoutn from 1997 to present. No matter how many times I call Time Warner, they say "We can't find a record of that. This will need to be sent to research." I can't pay it, and it honestly doesn't exist. I can't dispute it with the credit bureau, because someone at Time Warner says it's valid, but no one will take my money.
Do I need my new boss asking "Why are you fucking with Time Warner?" Not really.. I could rant for months about them, their customer service, and faulty services.. But a new boss doesn't need to hear a rant..
I agree about the points.. I've "experemented" with the system quite a bit to see how it works.. At one point, I applied for every credit card I could find. I got 3 ($200 limit), and then a whole stack of rejection letters based on the fact that there were too many queries. Well, now we know how that works.:) Make sure there are very limited queries for 6 months, and then do your purchase..
What sucks about that is, some credit card companies will hit your credit history monthly. Oh, and avoid Wells Fargo Bank in California like the plauge. They were hitting my credit history twice monthly, looking for problems. Once they found anything resembling a problem, they closed my checking account, and seized all my funds. The kicker on this one? It was a week before Christmas, and I had $1 in my pocket.
Loud customers bitching about their money and how the kids won't have presents does have some pull, especially when you're embarassing the bank in front of a lobby full of customers.
That was the 4th bank mistake in a month.. I've never had so many problems with a bank. There is a bank across the street from them, that was more than happy to open an account for me, and I haven't had a single problem with yet. They take my paycheck, I write bill checks, and we're both happy.:)
It'll be another 5 months before all those extra hits fall off. {sigh}
It's not like Microsoft made the newest IIS service patch deny service to all Opera browsers.. It's not that it's not showing any content.. There's a bug on the page that moves fonts 30 pixels to the left.. It's the same bug that exists in the code for MSIE and Netscape, but both of those handle it better than Opera does.
I still can't do Windows Updates on Windows machines from Netscape.. Why isn't anyone screaming about that yet?
Sorry for the math failure. But still 0.42% isn't a significant number..
For our sites, we do cater to all of them, and are unaware of any design issues, but it's because we care to make it work for all of our own people, who use just about everything. But even so, out of all of our staff, we have two people who use Opera for anything beyond checking the pages, and even they don't use it very much..
If I worked at Netscape, and I had the designers working on the front page of the Netscape site, I'd have them making sure that the page is 100% compatable with Netscape..
Take it out of the realm of the Internet.. Does Mercedes guarantee compatability with Ford parts?
I moved to Los Angeles recently. They have an abundance of "Compact" parking spaces. I never saw one in Florida. I drive a 2000 TransAm WS/6, which doesn't fit in these spaces. The city of Los Angeles has made parking spaces incompatable with my car.
We stood on the side of a busy road the other day, and counted cars for a little while. An impromptu survey. More than half the vehicles were SUV's. Of the remaining half, they were decent size cars, which wouldn't fit in these spaces.. There are several state owned parking facilities with over 50% "compact" car spaces.
What should I do? Trade in the car that I really like and enjoy driving, for a Geo Metro? I *HAD* a Mazda Miata, which would have fit nicely in these spaces, but I'd never go back to one, after driving a newer TransAm.
Now for a decent comparison, a Hummer (original model) wouldn't fit in these parking spaces. They'd take up at least two.. A Chevy Suburban, and Chevy Avalanche wouldn't either. If they managed to swing into the space, the back would still take up the remaining driving path. Lets say that they account for 0.2% of the cars on the road.. I don't see anyone protesting the Los Angeles County gov't saying they should redesign all of their parking structures.
So, lets take our example from the city of LA, and structure our sites for exactly who we want there.. 50% compact cars, 50% mid-size cars. 0% large cars or trucks. Or back in browser terms, make sure it works 100% with Netscape, 50% with MSIE (Netscape fits in both the Netscape and MSIE spaces), and 0% with others.
Can you tell I couldn't get a parking space the other day? I had to park in a deep underground level of a parking garage, several spaces away from other cars.. Tires on both sides were over the lines.. I don't consider this a "big" car.. My friend's Mustang GT has the same problems, because it's just about as wide.
I guess that shows how much I know about bankruptcy.:) I know my Becon score, and how percentages on my credit cards can make it fluctuate.. I don't have many cards, and none of them have much of a limit, so it's easy to play with the percentage that they are used.. If I go from 100% used ($1000 owed) to 0% used ($1000 available), then my becon score jumps substantially.. I had vauge confirmation from some lenders, but tried it myself by pulling Equifax reports for a few months in a row..
I wouldn't be particularly fond of an employer going through the report though.. "Oh, you have a Sears card!" Or worse, "There's a collection debt for $32.95 from Raunchy-Smut-Magazine, Inc. It's been resolved, but it still shows. That's against the moral values of our family company":)
I wouldn't work anywhere with moral values anyways.. hehe I'm decidedly against drug testing too. What I do on my time is my business.. If I go drinking, or smoke some pot, as long as I'm not under the influence at work, it's none of their business..
For the record, I don't drink or smoke.. (anyone believe that?)
Slashdot Mirror
Does pr0n accurately depict sex?
:) Oh, to be in Amsterdam..
Ummm.. ya. (duh).
Well, except we usually have more people and drugs at our parties. And it lasts longer than 60 minutes. The dialogue usually consists of the following:
Wanna fuck?
Ya
got a cigarette
can I get some pot/pills/blow off ya?
Has anyone seen my underwear? Never mind, I don't need it anyways.
Hmmmm.. If we had cameras running, I wonder how many tapes we could fill.. I guess we could get in a little trouble for the drugs, eh? Maybe we should just start doing live shows..
When that little girl grows up, I want her...
:) Funny, I always end up dating women who look at a computer and ask "Do you have AOL? I want to chat."
:) Well, til we get bored (about 20 seconds), and go out for drinks for the night. :)
Any woman that can use Unix has a spot in my heart.
{sigh}
I want to date one that will sit down, write an AOL chat bot in 1/2 hour, and then we can giggle at people's reactions together.
Are you in a classified department at the gov't? They only release bits of the information on the actual specs, and even those are vauge.. We know it's black. We know it's max speed is in excess of Mach 4, and it has a service ceiling of LEO. Search the net a bit, or find a good book on the subject.
M L/ EC95-42883-4.html
:)
:)
As for the term LEO (Low Earth Orbit), a quick search on google found NASA's defination as:
http://lsda.jsc.nasa.gov/kids/L&W/glossary.htm
---
Low Earth Orbit (LEO)
LEO is the term used to describe the space between 160 nautical miles to up to 300 nautical miles attitude. Which is the range of Space Shuttle missions.
---
The highest number on an official site I've seen for the SR-71 said 50 miles, so the other references of it flying there fall outside of NASA's spec for LEO.
Orbit is definately where you're flying, not that you're actually maintaining it.. Mir was in orbit til it hit the Pacific. It was in anything but a circle.
And don't forget about geosynchronous satellites.. 0 ground speed. If it wasn't, you'd have one hell of a time readjusting your DSS dish constantly. They have no speed to 'em, they just hang on a logical string (gravity).
This page cites the SR-71 to do at least:
http://www.dfrc.nasa.gov/gallery/photo/SR-71/HT
---
Developed for the USAF as reconnaissance aircraft more than 30 years ago, SR-71s are still the world's fastest and highest-flying production aircraft. The aircraft can fly at speeds of more than 2,200 miles per hour (Mach 3+ or more than three times the speed of sound) and at altitudes of over 85,000 feet.
---
16 miles, or Mach 3.14 (at sea level).. But since it's still classified, they're just giving minimum's..
Kind of like saying my car can do 65mph, even though I know I've driven it over 160mph. General Motors can't advertise that the TransAm WS/6 or Camaro SS can do in excess of 160mph, so they just say "Fast".
BTW, a standard late model TransAm can exceed 150, without trying hard, you just need lots of road to do it in.. At 2.5 miles per minute, a couple seconds covers lots of ground. A WS/6 gets there even faster. Trust me.
Share what you know.. The more people that share their experiences, the more people we can save from making the same mistake we did (dealing with Wells Fargo Bank)
Already did it.. The first time, I accepted banks can have errors.. The second time, I took it personally..
:)
I wasn't very far from the choices of lawsuit or showing up with gun in hand.. I'm all about using force to get my way. If I have to set a gun on someone's desk to get what's mine, it may be done.
I'd really like to know which morons we're dealing with, that we shouldn't be..
What if it wasn't Amazon, and turned out to be a regional grocery store that records all card numbers? Lots of people use debit/credit cards for groceries. Maybe "Von's" in California.. or Albertons (national)? Or Publix or Winn Dixie(South East). I'd bet a grocery store has weaker security than a web company.
Wells Fargo Bank cancelled my debit/Visa card with no notice.. Why? Because I purchased groceries in Los Angeles, and then there was a $300 purchase in the mid west for a plane ticket a few hours later.
:)
Unfortunately, the $300 ticket was to get my 13 year old step-daughter on a plane to see her dad. We didn't know til we got to the airport and Delta told us my card was stolen..
I pulled out my card, and my ID, and showed it to them.. Didn't matter.. I called the bank. They had no record of who did it, only that it was reported as stolen.
Took me 8 hours on the phones with the bank, airline, and every vendor I had bought from in the surrounding days to find out what happened.
When the airline called to verify the card, the bank took the fact that I was buying a ticket for her to be fraud, and cancelled my card immediately.
I went to the bank to get it fixed. They said they tried to contact me. They had my correct number on file (my cell), but said it was disconnected. I had them call my cell from their desk. Amazingly enough, it rang, and I answered.
I've had banks call me before to verify transactions. I have no problem with that. But, lying about it pisses me off.
I wonder how badly they'd handle me on a road trip. I drive from Florida to California and back on a semi-regular basis.. It takes me three days, with very little sleep. That would probably get the card cancelled too.. I'd hate to be stuck in Kent Texas with no gas and a cancelled credit card, because they thought I had traveled too far.
I had a whole stack of returned items, and a whole lot of merchants to apologize to for the bank's error. I never received an apology from the bank.
A month later (a week before xmas), they accidently closed my bank account. I didn't find out til the ATM took my new card.. Their system said there was fraudulent activity. Another bank error. They put all my funds on hold til Jan 6. Good thing I have friends who would loan me money over Christmas. It really sucks to ask your friends to buy everything.. But, they all got paid back after I got my money back.
Every bill check I had sent out previous got bounced. Wells Fargo *ALSO* charged me $25 per check for NSF, even though the funds were in the account, but they erroniously put on fraud hold by them.
You wouldn't believe how pissed I was when I got to the bank. I was polite at first.. They continued to tell me how they were keeping my money.. So, I got louder.. They threatened to call the cops. I told them to. I *WANTED* a cop to hear them saying that they made a mistake and took my money, and wouldn't give it to me.
The bank security were the only nice people working there. One of the guards told me how they screwed him over too, so he was completely sympathetic. He was just standing around to make sure I didn't get physically violent. No problem there, I don't get physically violent, he doesn't have to do anything but stand there.
Warning! Never Use Wells Fargo Bank!
I finally got the second set of NSF fees dropped after a few hours of screaming.. Hopefully the customers who overheard the incident had second thoughts of keeping their account at Wells Fargo.
[Rant Mode Off]
I'm now using a nice small bank, that doesn't have the same problems. I told them all about it when I opened my new account. They had heard similiar stories before about them. I'm on a first name basis with the new bank, and they love me.
In other news, iBill reports record earnings this week, with 4 accounts charging $9.95 to 2.2 million users..
Mmmmm.. What I could do with $21,890,000.. hehe.
BTW, anyone looking to buy a nice slightly used list of 2.2 million credit cards, Email me..
(just kidding)
It's a thought I can entertain.. I know perfectly well I'll never get on some big gov't built anything craft, if it does exist in my lifetime..
/scouts.. The shuttle is like a pack mule with a limp.. We're in serious need of a sail boat, or something that'll get us more than a few feet outside of what we know..
:) As long as we can calculate the probability (or improbability), anything is possible.. :)
If I have the rough equivalant of a sailboat in the middle of an ocean, it's more than we have now.. Look at what we've been doing..
Put what we're doing now in relationship to human travel on the planet.. The satellites we're sending out to other planets are like single recon
But ya, I love your links.. Were they all Adams quotes? (It's late, and I'm a bit tired)
A little improbability drive would be nice.
Well, "moons" was thrown in there, as a planet and any bodies that may be around it.. If there are or aren't is pretty much academic right now.. If there's something the size of a Volkswagon, or something the size of our moon that we haven't spotted doesn't really matter til something flies by.. The mass of Venus would be the important part..
Since I can't imagine the mass of such a ship to be all that much (relatively), a nice solid chunk of rock 10 miles across would be at least something to work with.
If the world works well, and things fall together where I can someday make such a ship (remote control or otherwise), I'll be sure to let
Been there lately?
If you're such an expert on our solar system, you'd be fully aware that the count of moons or even the number of planets in our solar system, changes on a regular basis..
Hell, we aren't even sure how many moons the Earth has.. Is it 2? Is it 3? Ok, #2 that they found recently was quickly dismissed as space junk, but #3 is expected to be in orbit in 100 years or so, and stay around for quite a while.. I believe Slashdot carried the story..
I don't expect any celestial facts to be solidified until we've actually visited those places..
Even in the last year or two, the opinions of the composition of the surface of Mars has been at least three things.
1) It's all rock.
2) Large bodies of frozen water are covered by a thin layer of dirt
3) The ice caps are covered with a thick layer of solid nitrogen, and almost no water/ice.
And we have a bit of equipment on and around Mars.. I don't believe any space agency has the same kind of equipment around Venus..
Unless of course, you just fell off a Vogon ship, and have some important news to share with us. Just don't read me any poetry.
I want a sail the size of Luxemburg.
Or the size of Bill Gates house..
I'm not sure which is larger.
Of course, once you put the sail down, you don't dramatically loose speed. There is a slight lack of resistance in space.. Well, other than gravity, solar winds, free hydrogen, and other space clutter.. But gravity would probably be your best friend.. Or navigational engines.. It should be pretty easy to stop something pretty light. It'll take a lot less force than say making 200 tons fly off the surface of the earth.
Solar sails towards the sun, or gravity.. Or navigational engines.. :)
I'm guessing that he's eluding to the Nazi's work in better aeronautical work. They were leaders in rocket and jet powered aircraft.. Well, til they lost.. :)
War is a great innovator. Jet aircraft were developed for military applications, and it trickled down to us civilians..
Of course, it takes a long time for us to get stuff. Look at the SR-71 Blackbird.. Flies in excess of Mach 4, and achieves a low earth orbit. No civilian versions of that yet though..
Boeing has a nice civilian airline version of it, that was posted on here a few months ago.. Only 40+ years after the SR-71 was designed.
Imagine if the gov't didn't try to keep everything secret. We'd be able to fly in low earth orbit, and do a full orbit of the planet in less than 2 hours.. They would have been flying a better shuttle, that didn't have a long running known design defect.. Ya.. I remember in the 80's, they were talking about the shuttle loosing heat tiles then.. You'd think they'd be using a better method by now...
Unless, of course, the theory of the left landing gear deploying early is true.. Or was it the landing gear door falling off..
It's the same force that keeps the moon in orbit without falling down on us..
:)
:)
:)
Centrifugal force pulls the moon away from us.
Gravity (both from the Earth and Moon) pull them towards each other.
Kind of like if you swing a weight on a string. But gravity is the string. That's why the moon can be not in a geosynchronous orbit. It's string moves.
With a heavy weight (platform) on the end of their carbon nanotube string, far enough away from the Earth, the platform should be pulling on the string, so the fact that you're pulling a bit on the string back down isn't much.. You'd be as significant as an ant on top of a mountain.
That'll be an interesting place to visit..
I wonder how long after the build it, that someone will build a solar sail craft.. It's not a hard concept.. Make "sails" big enough to create a small force from the solar winds. Then it would be a simple matter of riding the winds and gravational forces of the bodies encountered. Mars may be a lot closer than we thought.. You could fly the solar system with almost no fuel.
I volunteer to take a fast run to Pluto. The course should be pretty easy. It'll just take a little math to figure out..
Leave the platform, "falling" towards the moon. Pass the moon, and change your vector towards the sun (ok, a little fuel). Now "fall" towards the sun.. It's a good sized object, it should have a little pull. (hehe).
Use Venus and it's moons your next turning point. Sails out, then pick and choose your planets to use to manuver..
With a bit of good navigation other solar systems aren't quite as unreachable as they are now..
Good.. I was thinking we're idiots too.. Either that, or I need to start routing all my traffic down the most conjested pipes to watch it go faster. :)
n g
I've worked with our provider a bit with routing. We have mirrored servers in colo's around the country. If one city is conjested, we move traffic *AWAY* from the conjestion. Usually our traffic makes a difference for everyone else. I can have 500Mb/s added or removed from any given city within an hour, without flinching. Of course, before I do something like that, I put in a call first.. "Hey, can this city take 500Mb/s right now?"
We wrote a program to take traceroutes from all the cities to various points, and plot them all onto a big network map, with ping times and the like.. We know which cities, peerings, or lines have problems at a glance..
http://www.voyeurweb.com/network.12.23.2002-11h.p
Warning: This picture is *BIG*. It's of our networks in Los Angeles, New York, Tampa, between each other, and to all of the root nameservers.. It makes a rather extensive map that is 11580x2669. It won't fit on your screen. Save it, and take it into your favorite image editing software to view it..
This map is a little old (Dec 23, 2002 at 11am), but it gives a good impression of what the networks immediately around our servers looked like, and how they interact with each other.. Shitty networks stand out in red.. I definately wouldn't want to MORE of my traffic that way. Sometimes we don't have a choice. If your ISP uses a shitty provider, we have to send it that way..
Ok, this has to be the most convoluted article I've ever read.. They're effectively saying, don't use the best route, pick another, because your extra traffic may break the best route.
:)
We diagramed a sample network here in the office, to try and explain what we just read to ourselves.. We picked 5 cities (New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas, and Miami), and drew direct routes between Miami, LA, and NY to each other. Chicago gets routes to NY and LA. Dallas gets routes to everything but Chicago.
We then contemplated what a packet from LA to NY would be looking at.
On our mythical network, we have the following ping times.
LA -> NY 20ms
LA -> Chicago -> NY 25ms
LA -> Dallas -> NY 40ms
LA -> Miami -> NY 60ms
So, we shoudn't be selfish, and take the LA->NY route? We should direct our traffic LA->Dallas->NY ? If this route is already slow or conjested, what good does that do? Now instead of using a perfectly good route, we're killing a conjected one.
If LA->NY is the best/fastest at the time, use it. If/when that becomes more conjested, it will no longer be the best choice, and the new best choice will be chosen..
Not everyone is going to be using YOUR best choice all the time.. Very doubtful that Miami will be routing to LA to go to NY. If they do, it's because Miami->LA is already overloaded. But as it usually works, For Miami->NY, there is already a second best choice (Miami->Dallas->NY).
No matter how we look at it, this doesn't make any sense.. Here's a sample of the lines for our example.
LA->NY OC192
LA->Chicago OC48
Chicago->NY OC48
LA->Dallas OC48
Dallas->NY OC24
So, we'll leave the LA->NY route empty, and keep dumping our load onto the lesser routes?
I do like the idea though, to keep the best choice (LA->NY) open for myself.. Everyone else chooses the second best route.. Go ahead and flood those OC48's, I'll use the OC192 that no one else uses..
- Flowers at the beginning.
- Dinner & drinks
- Entertainment (club, movie)
- Foreplay
- Sex
A pathetic date wouldn't make it past 1.. I show up with flowers, she shows up looking like a heroin junkie just coming down, that's the end of it..An annoying date doesn't get past 2.. It's amazing how useful those "Call me at 10pm" calls are.. Always give yourself an out.. Unless you're just hard up for the sex, but even then, if you're that hard up, you aren't getting that far.
If we get to 3, you almost have it made.. Don't hit on her friends at the club, or steal all the candy at the movie..
If you get to 4, you're just proving to her that you're worth taking to 5..
If you get past 5, and she makes you breakfast in the morning, you've found the perfect woman.
Lots is always a relative term.. 10,000 people complaining to Microsoft about something seems like a lot.. But put it in perspective. There are millions of copies of their software out there.
:)
To someone like me, if I had 10,000 customers upset with me, I'd have a serious problem (Personally, I don't have 10,000 customers), but to Microsoft, 10,000 customers completely upset with them that switch to Linux or Apple is insignificant.
But, they do want to squeeze you for every penny. That's why they keep getting more complicatd with their registration procedures.. If I remember correctly, the only qualification for installing Windows 3.1 was that you had the disks in hand. There was no registration code. They still made a fortune on it. People were sharing that all over the place.. I can't tell you how many "OEM" MSDOS and Win31 installations I saw, where the owner never had a book or disk from Microsoft..
I personally knew a place that did "OEM" Win95 and Win98 installations. They bought a case of pirated CD's.. Then they'd do the installations and never give the customers the disk or book. The box of pirated CD's was just for the 1 in 50 who complained because they didn't have a CD..
Microsoft looses a lot of money that way, but they make a whole lot too.. But why be a multi-billion dollar corporation, when you can be a multi-trillion dollar corporation..
Just imagine if they spent that money on making the product better, or giving it away to the community for further development. I'm sure something like the Apache Group would love $100 million to further their Win32 development..
Well, for the drug thing, there are lots of things that are legal and bad for you.. I was on some prescription pain killers for a while.. Highly addictive (but I wasn't), but they left me pretty much stoned for part of the day.. Usually from 6pm til 3am.. I've known people that are seriously addicted to them.. It's not too hard to find references to people who have died from them (Start with some famous references like Elvis and Marlyn Monroe).
:) Make sure there are very limited queries for 6 months, and then do your purchase..
:)
No one has died from pot. Any condition that is claimed of it can be assigned to a whole variety of legal drugs (alcohol included).
The order was just an example. I get questioned about my credit cards every time I buy or apply for something.. I have three cards through a well known bank. There's a record of a fourth that was charged off but paid, and marked as "lost/stolen/or cancelled". I don't care to explain that to everyone that looks at my credit history, but every time I buy a car, it gets explained.
Time Warner Communication is also a clusterfuck. I was an existing customer with the m in Florida. There were two records on my credit history for them. $197 past due from like 1999, and an existing (and active) accoutn from 1997 to present. No matter how many times I call Time Warner, they say "We can't find a record of that. This will need to be sent to research." I can't pay it, and it honestly doesn't exist. I can't dispute it with the credit bureau, because someone at Time Warner says it's valid, but no one will take my money.
Do I need my new boss asking "Why are you fucking with Time Warner?" Not really.. I could rant for months about them, their customer service, and faulty services.. But a new boss doesn't need to hear a rant..
I agree about the points.. I've "experemented" with the system quite a bit to see how it works.. At one point, I applied for every credit card I could find. I got 3 ($200 limit), and then a whole stack of rejection letters based on the fact that there were too many queries. Well, now we know how that works.
What sucks about that is, some credit card companies will hit your credit history monthly. Oh, and avoid Wells Fargo Bank in California like the plauge. They were hitting my credit history twice monthly, looking for problems. Once they found anything resembling a problem, they closed my checking account, and seized all my funds. The kicker on this one? It was a week before Christmas, and I had $1 in my pocket.
Loud customers bitching about their money and how the kids won't have presents does have some pull, especially when you're embarassing the bank in front of a lobby full of customers.
That was the 4th bank mistake in a month.. I've never had so many problems with a bank. There is a bank across the street from them, that was more than happy to open an account for me, and I haven't had a single problem with yet. They take my paycheck, I write bill checks, and we're both happy.
It'll be another 5 months before all those extra hits fall off. {sigh}
Hey now, you can't say you have an OS-neutral game, and not tell us what it is.. What are your games? :)
It's not like Microsoft made the newest IIS service patch deny service to all Opera browsers.. It's not that it's not showing any content.. There's a bug on the page that moves fonts 30 pixels to the left.. It's the same bug that exists in the code for MSIE and Netscape, but both of those handle it better than Opera does.
I still can't do Windows Updates on Windows machines from Netscape.. Why isn't anyone screaming about that yet?
Sorry for the math failure. But still 0.42% isn't a significant number..
For our sites, we do cater to all of them, and are unaware of any design issues, but it's because we care to make it work for all of our own people, who use just about everything. But even so, out of all of our staff, we have two people who use Opera for anything beyond checking the pages, and even they don't use it very much..
If I worked at Netscape, and I had the designers working on the front page of the Netscape site, I'd have them making sure that the page is 100% compatable with Netscape..
Take it out of the realm of the Internet.. Does Mercedes guarantee compatability with Ford parts?
I moved to Los Angeles recently. They have an abundance of "Compact" parking spaces. I never saw one in Florida. I drive a 2000 TransAm WS/6, which doesn't fit in these spaces. The city of Los Angeles has made parking spaces incompatable with my car.
We stood on the side of a busy road the other day, and counted cars for a little while. An impromptu survey. More than half the vehicles were SUV's. Of the remaining half, they were decent size cars, which wouldn't fit in these spaces.. There are several state owned parking facilities with over 50% "compact" car spaces.
What should I do? Trade in the car that I really like and enjoy driving, for a Geo Metro? I *HAD* a Mazda Miata, which would have fit nicely in these spaces, but I'd never go back to one, after driving a newer TransAm.
Now for a decent comparison, a Hummer (original model) wouldn't fit in these parking spaces. They'd take up at least two.. A Chevy Suburban, and Chevy Avalanche wouldn't either. If they managed to swing into the space, the back would still take up the remaining driving path. Lets say that they account for 0.2% of the cars on the road.. I don't see anyone protesting the Los Angeles County gov't saying they should redesign all of their parking structures.
So, lets take our example from the city of LA, and structure our sites for exactly who we want there.. 50% compact cars, 50% mid-size cars. 0% large cars or trucks. Or back in browser terms, make sure it works 100% with Netscape, 50% with MSIE (Netscape fits in both the Netscape and MSIE spaces), and 0% with others.
Can you tell I couldn't get a parking space the other day? I had to park in a deep underground level of a parking garage, several spaces away from other cars.. Tires on both sides were over the lines.. I don't consider this a "big" car.. My friend's Mustang GT has the same problems, because it's just about as wide.
We're talking a web site here, not physical access to public facilities..
I haven't seen the braille edition of the Podunk Georgia Gazette either.
I guess that shows how much I know about bankruptcy. :) I know my Becon score, and how percentages on my credit cards can make it fluctuate.. I don't have many cards, and none of them have much of a limit, so it's easy to play with the percentage that they are used.. If I go from 100% used ($1000 owed) to 0% used ($1000 available), then my becon score jumps substantially.. I had vauge confirmation from some lenders, but tried it myself by pulling Equifax reports for a few months in a row..
:)
I wouldn't be particularly fond of an employer going through the report though.. "Oh, you have a Sears card!" Or worse, "There's a collection debt for $32.95 from Raunchy-Smut-Magazine, Inc. It's been resolved, but it still shows. That's against the moral values of our family company"
I wouldn't work anywhere with moral values anyways.. hehe I'm decidedly against drug testing too. What I do on my time is my business.. If I go drinking, or smoke some pot, as long as I'm not under the influence at work, it's none of their business..
For the record, I don't drink or smoke.. (anyone believe that?)